Category Archives: social media

IIA Toolshed #5

Influencer Tools

Tooler’s Choice? Buzzsumo is an online tool that tracks content on all social networking sites and ranks them based on the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. It allows you to find out what content is popular by topic or on any website. You can input search criteria and find out what content is already working in your area so you can identify some quick wins for social content production. Buzzsumo allows you to set up keyword alerts, so you are updated when content is posted or updated. Knowing what content is working on social for your competitors or other publishers in your industry is very helpful. Buzzsumo is a great way to find top content around specific keywords, phrases or topics which is a very useful tool when turning a content plan or strategy into a content calendar of topics. Be careful when using Buzzsumo that you don’t fall into the comfort zone of writing about what is already doing well instead of finding new topics that haven’t been written about yet but combined with other tools Buzzsumo is an excellent tool in the social or content marketers toolkit. You can also track social influencers by keyword and sector. Overall it is very powerful for social content but the free version is limited.

General Information

Product

Topsy

Klear

Buzzumo

Followerwonk

twazzup

Klout

Website

http://topsy.com/

http://klear.com/

http://buzzsumo.com/

https://followerwonk.com/

http://twazzup.com/

https://klout.com/

What Is It

Social search and analytics tool. A search engine for Twitter. It keeps an index of tweets dating back to 2006. Purchased by Apple in 2013, the toolshed found the tool to be largely undeveloped since then not offering much additional value than Twitter search. Very limited analytics in the free version.

Website with real time search of twitter for influencers within Twitter. Search by company name, keyword or #hashtag.

Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which is a numerical value between 1 and 100

What's It Like To Use?

At time of assessment, we found the tool to be slow and buggy.

Easy on the eye. you can search for influencers in certain segments (eg food or music) and by country (ie. Ireland), it gives you lists (which include some randomers) and then it's quite manual to add these influencers to your lists.

Free version very limited. 14 day free trial of Pro is good. Fairly user friendly. Good webinars to get started. No need to enter credit card details to trial 🙂

Easy (ish) to use and find Twitter Bios. However in order to get best results, you must have a handle on basic Boolean Logic. Eg. (Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Cork, Mayo). Easy to filter results by number of followers and/or Social Authority. It is also very easy to benchmark your Twitter handle with other Twitter accounts.

Each to use. Authenticate via your twitter account and go search. Throws up the top 25 influencers who you can sort by different options. The influencer is defined by the the number of followers which can have distortions (2x number of followers doesn't mean 2x influence) but its not bad.

Very easy to use - sign in with multiple social accounts. Great UI, good dashboard that shows all your accounts, gives you a feed that you can use to create (and schedule) engaging posts. You can set what topic you want to be known for, and it gives you your score based on that. The mobile app can be a bit buggy and it works better on Chrome rather than IE browser.

Is There Anything I Should Know?

It's easy to use but functionality is limited. It was bought by Apple a few years ago and it feels as if not much development has been put into the tool since then.

it's very expensive for what it is! And we don't trust the results!

Finds content that is most shared across Social, Find influencers by topic, you can set up key alerts by keywords, brands etc & you can track competitors.

Followerwork has some nice functions if you have a paid Moz Account ($99 per month). Functions include being able to Analyze and track Twitter accounts. However my favourite paid feature is the ability to export your Twitter bio search results into a CSV/Excel file. A brilliant option for Twitter advertising campaigns. Finally if this interests you, but you don't have $99 a month.....Grab the FREE 30 day trial and start seraching and exporting Twitter lists.

Not bad (and its free). Used it to on a number of different categories then used it to search the #fennelly hashtag from 1st September and gave me a reasonably good list of results. Its not been updated in a while and not clear who runs it or who pays for it. Algorithim works purely by number of followers.

Score is based upon a algorithm that crunches variables like your follower size and relevance but is heavily influnced by engagement RT and @ replies. The score is more a measure of impact and possibly influence. The Chrome plugin for Klout is very handy. Hootsuite users can also search by Klout score so big credit to Hootsuite for incorporating this functionality.

Who would you recommend it for?

Useful for searching a URL and seeing who has mentioned it on Twitter even if they didn't mention you. Useful for analysis competitors and generic terms.

Brand managers with lots of budget and time on their hands!

Anyone trying to effectively listen to the market, keep track of competitors, and get key insights into who to follow

Anyone trying to build up a targeted following on Twitter. Anyone looking to find potential influencers in their industry. A company that is looking to build targeted twitter list and advertising campaigns.

Its free so its something that you can use with ease. If you know something quite well you may not get much out of it e.g. the #digitaltransformation tag gave me mostly a list of people I have on a list which means its accurate and adds a little but too much. But its free so no harm to try and see if it adds value.

Anyone looking to have a presence on social for a particular reason; its good to help you maintain a focus, but is limited as Klout will fall down if you are someone who publishes multiple types of content e.g. a news agency. Not for multiple users. Very useful for bench marking against other influncers or competitors and setting targets. Handy for quick checking of influencer before outreach.

Cost

FREE. There is a pro version. $12k pa per user

$99 up to $600 per month

Free, Pro, Agency& Enterprise price plans are available. $99 per month for Pro, $299 per month for agency. Enterprise pricing is available upon request. Going from free to $99 per month seems a bit of a leap and the trial period is short at only 14 days.

Great functionality with the FREE version. $99 if you want to export results and benefit from additional features.

Free

Free

General Criteria (Out Of 4)

Ease Of Use

3

2

3

3

4

3

Price

3

1

2

4

4

4

Documentation

0

3

3

3

1

3

Mobile compatible?

4

2

3

2

3

3

Tablet compatible?

3

3

3

3

3

0

Specific Criteria (Out of 4)

Search by topic

4

1

3

3* (only searches Twitter Bios)

3

3

Competitive Evaluation

2

3

3

2

1

2

Trends over Time

2

0

0

0

0

2

Regional/Geographical Search

0

1

3

4

0

2

Influencer Search Ability

0

3

3

3

3

4

Saved Search Ability

0

4

3

0

0

0

Total Score

21

23

29

24

22

26

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Marketing Automation

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

IIA Toolshed #3

Social Media Monitoring

Tooler’s Choice?

We looked at four social media monitoring tools, no one is the winner because they are all very different and serve different needs.

Market leader Radian6 from salesforce is powerful and provides all you need for monitoring and listening, but it is truly an enterprise solution and requires a hefty investment. For enterprise, Radian6 is one of the best there is.

Mention is accessibly priced tool for medium sized companies, with budget, who have reasonably large web and social search monitoring needs and wish to centralised the management of these. Ideal for those who have report generating needs and wish to involve large teams.

New Irish offering, Olytico is an interesting software and a service tool. You tell Olytico what keywords you want to track, they set up the searches for you, and you use the tool to view results. It neatly overcomes the problem that many face with social media monitoring tools of only being as good as your search terms, but this at times can be a bit limiting. We decided that Olytico is the perfect tool for agencies who need to report back on how far their client’s brand travelled across the social media spaces.

Social Bakers is probably best suited to SME’s, although it only really monitors what’s being said about your own social media, rather than listening widely about broader conversations. It serves a purpose for bringing reporting together and does that very well, providing benchmark industry data.

General Information

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

Radian6 is a Social Media listening and monitoring tool owned by Salesforce.com. It is heavily integrated with other Salesforce products (Buddy Media) and features. Very often used as part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud package. They are repackaging Radian6 with new features under a new name called Social Studio

Mention is a online social media monitoring tool that searches the main social media channels and incorporates alerts, responding capability, task assignment, reporting and analysis.

Software AND a service! It's a hybrid between self service and managed. You tell Olytico what you want to track, they set it up for you, and you can then do the monitoring yourself

Simple to use. Set up automated searches by keywords and/or company name. Search by location for better results. One of the best things about Radian6 is its ability to turn searches into really digestible reports. Within seconds I can search, measure and identify business opportunities. It is great for analysing sentiment, monitoring competitors and identifying influencers and brand advocates.

Reasonably simple set up. Does a very broad search and generates good reports. Allows you to respond to mentions or allocate to team members.

Simple to use. It's all set up for you. Can view activity by day, and assign content to team members. Cannot track whether they have actually done something with it or not. It trawls all the main social platforms (FB pages plus open groups, not profiles), Flickr, Insta, not that strong on Pinterest, plus forums, and news sites.

It's easy to use at basic level. Free Trial offered for 2 weeks. Heavily focused on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. May be more customisation possible but not obvious.

Does it give meaningful results for Ireland?

Yes - easy to limit results to Ireland only

Yes. Strong on Twitter especially when hashtaged

Yes. Strong on Ireland as you'd expect from an Irish tool.

Yes, as strong as any other country

Is There Anything I Should Know?

Salesforce seem very cloak and dagger in giving anyone access to it unless they are a large multinational and already using the Salesforce platform. Very difficult to get a price list from them.
They can penalise organisations when high volumes of data.

Range of functionality appears limited for the price. Much of the functionality could be achieved with free tools like google alerts and topsy/social mention. Low threshold on number of mentions means upgrade for busy accounts.

Workflow exists in that you can tick the box and assign content to team members. Team collaboration is coming, where you can mark it as done or dealt with. Good support function.

Ideally you should set up more than one business for benchmarking, so ideally you're monitoring you and your competition. I like the presentation format exportable reports. Love reports about which types of posts perform best, which times of day, and days of week, also industry benchmarks

Who would you recommend it for?

Organisations already using the Salesforce.com platform. Great for big companies with a sizable budget and a large community to monitor and listen to. Possibly a good tool for Digital Agencies who want to offer listening and monitoring services to their clients. Enterprise.

Medium to large organisations with budget who wish to utilise the team collaboration features. Suitable for disparate enterprises centralising brand/company mentions who appear over a wide variety of online sites.

Agencies needing to track client mentions. Or brands/businesses who are being talked about widely and not just on FB and TW. Good example given was Jameson Film Festival, who were talked about widely for a month. No annual contract means they can sign up and use the tool just for the month.

Medium size businesses who are

Cost inc VAT

Expensive - Pricing in Feb 2013 - The good folks at Radian6 got back to me and it turns out that they have changed their pricing model. There are now two different models:

Business Model: $600 / month for up to 10,000 mentions
Agency Model: $950 / month for up to 1 million mentions
Historical Data: $100 / month going back to 2008 (except Twitter that goes back to 2010) Source Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive

Starter $29, Growth $99, Company $299, Enterprise $799 (per month)

€700 per month, without limitation on keywords or Results or seat/user. If you want separate feeds per channel, €200 per additional channel. Single chanel is good 2-3 clients..

"Free Trial for 2 weeks. $120 per month thereafter. I believe there are other more tiered products, but v difficult to get access, and default is to 120 per month. Social Bakers Statistics = free. Marketing Suite = paid. Additional
upgrade features = Analytics (customised reporting, benchmarking etc),
Builder (Plan, publish, measure from single place), Advertising (plugin
to FB & Twitter ads), Listening."

Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive

You can’t experiment with searches

No API integration

Customisable dashboard

3

3

1

2

Product Intuitiveness / UI

3

2

4

3

Team Collaboration Features?

3

3

2

1

Are we going to continue using it?

0

0

2

3

Total Score

35

32

32

34

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Social Media Design Tools in July.

Summary:

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

IIA Toolshed #2

Social Media Publishing Tools

Check out the detailed review below including Buffer, SproutSocial, and SocialOomph.

General Information

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

A Social Media scheduling and reporting platform.
You can schedule and manage content from your Facebook (Personal and Business), Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Wordpress accounts. It also has 100s of additional apps that gives your monitoring and commenting abilities on other sites including Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

Social media productivity tool which allows you to
publish and monitor social media activity

Sprout Social is an online social media management, reporting and engagement tool that enables publishing (incorporating analytics's) to various social media platforms.

What’s It Like To Use?

Pretty easy and seamless. No real learning. Support was a bit generic. Dashboard intuitive - easy to remove accounts. When you move stuff around or change times, it caused a few problems.

Easy to set up and use. Just go to hootsuite.com and sign up. Easy to add Social Media accounts and search for add on apps. Its dashboard is easy to navigate, search social networks and see previous scheduled posts. Hootsuite has a mobile app that allows you to manage your activity on the go. However - would recommend that you do the bulk of your Hootsuite scheduling and reporting from the Desktop dashboard.

When it comes to giving access to another user, they must create a social oomph account, it's time consuming. The interface appears to be very poor but it does have some good functionality. Cons: It is not intuitive and learning to use it takes some time. The design is hard to navigate.
Pros: It has feature called Queue Reservoir which helps to drip feed updates to selected social profiles. The Posting section does have a number of features such as creating and managing updates, creating updates from RSS feeds, and creating updates via email. The Following section facilitates follow-back and auto-welcome on Twitter as well as finding new people to follow function. The Monitoring section allows to set up regular email alerts for monitoring particular keywords found on Twitter. Other stats like mentions, retweets and following are also available.

Set up on a free trial was painless with minimum effort and adding social media profiles was generally a 2-3 click process to add Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Feedly. It also incorporates google analytics and operates using a classic dashboard. Posting to different social profiles was just a matter of adding the content and clicking the profiles with the optional inbuilt scheduler allowing flexibility on when it would appear. The dashboard in general was intuitive with rapid report generation and useful exploring and search tools. (EY) No option to upload video or multiple images to Twitter via the Scheduling App. Reporting option is great, with the option to sort Facebook posts per engagement particularly useful. Overall, it has many of the features needed under one dashboard (scheduling, reports, assign tasks, Twitter Advanced Search), which makes it extremely useful.

Is There Anything I Should Know?

Nothing compelling to upgrade. Auto shortens links to buff.ly, but you can override. Time zone of scheduler is confusing. If you've already scheduled a post to publish, you cannot change the distribution e.g. just add in G+ after scheduled - instead set up new post 🙁

Hootsuite has a cool bookmarker called Hootlet that allows you to schedule content directly from your web browser. Hootsuite also supports RSS feeds so you can ensure you latest blog is automatically distributed to Social Media as soon as it’s published. It also offers suggested content - which is similar in nature to the content you share and allows you add it to your publishing schedule (hit and miss at present). Hootsuite integrates with Google Analytics, Twitter and Facebook Insights and can create Social Media reports in seconds. Pro account holders are allowed create a number of reports for free, otherwise they come at an additional cost. Hootsuite allows you to add 100s of apps to your dashboard. E.g. Pocket and Feedly from Hootsuite and even manage YouTube Account. Finally - the only issue with Hootsuite at present is that it does not (currently) display visuals properly when posting from to Twitter, it posts as a link. And if you're posting a link, it posts 2 links if it's got an image in it.

45 mins to integrate a FB account. Not a good UI. Can schedule. Can bulk upload. Can integrate a bit.ly account and create a unique URL shortener. Very basic posting functions. Can create a Reservoir - can create a schedule to post at different times. Monitoring is basic - just mentions, and RT's. CLUNKY. Needs training. UGLY. Basic version can only add Twitter. 7 day trial you can add other accounts, big learning curve to learn it in 1 week. Support was quick enough, help section is descriptive - good - but it's a big time investment.

Follow up mails including offers of phone support from a dedicated person gave a nice personal touch to the experience. Sprout Social really comes into its own when you are managing teams with a powerful task manager and is very suited to larger organisations with disparate teams and multiple profiles. Its mobile version works well with similar functionality. One of the draw backs is the relatively low number of social profiles it connects to and would expect instagram etc.

Who would you recommend it for?

"An organisation (doesn't matter the size) who is already running its own publishing schedule, who wants to supplement with shared content. Yes,
it's probably not as sophisticated as some, but definitely a great scheduling tool, and a lot of functionality comes for free."

My favourite of all the platforms, but currently has a few issues with posting images (in particular to Twitter). Would recommend a PRO account that allows you to manage up to 100 accounts. I would use it to post to multiple LinkedIn and Facebook Groups.

We wouldn't!

A large organisation with multiple profiles and team members

Cost inc VAT

$10 per month Awesome (up to 100 posts and tweets + 10 social profiles per month) Freemium model. Free package is pretty good to get started. "Awesome package” has some analytics with export functionality, you can have more multiple admins on an account, and allows you to schedule more posts in advance. Awesome plan is $102 per year, Small Business Plan is $50/mth which is pricey. Discount for non-profits is nice touch.

Free account for up to 5 Social Networks. Hootsuite Pro (recommended) $9.99 per month (free 30 day trial available) - allows you to collaborate with up to 10 team members, manage 100 accounts and access free Social Media reports. There is a further paid option - Hootsuite Enterprise for larger organisiations.

One to watch: echobox – This new scheduling app might suit large publishers,
enabling them to curate ALL the content on their site to send to social. It forecasts ideal post times and layouts, AB testing each post. The range of features includes forecasting Page Views (which is the publisher’s bread and butter) and the algorithm learns what works and what doesn’t. One key aspect is you can flick a switch, and ultimately let it publish for you. Someone may be out of a job soon.

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

Thanks to web analytics software such as Google Analytics, website owners are now empowered with big data presented in a user friendly interface.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool. Google Analytics is free, user friendly, easy to install on a website or a blog, easy to integrate with the range of Google services such as AdWords, AdSense, Doubleclick, GWT, etc… This makes Google Analytics very popular et probably the most popular web analytics software on the market.

At TargetOnlineMarketing.com, we decided to review Google Analytics’ usage worldwide in 2012. Our technology partner W3techs.com explains how: “we investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.” W3techs.com’s CEO Matthias Gelbmann adds, “We include only the top 1 million websites in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well.”

According to Netcraft, there are around 700 million websites in June 2012, of which 190 million are active. On average, Google Analytics is installed on 55.8 per cent of websites – Google Analytics is installed on 100 million + websites -, giving Google Analytics a whopper 81.5 per cent market share of the worldwide web analytics software industry. The second place goes to LiveInternet with 5.4 per cent and ranking third is CNZZ with 4.1 per cent market share.

Some numbers about the use of Google Analytics worldwide:

In Europe, we love Google Analytics, just under 62 per cent of all websites have it installed

Only South America beats Europe to the top spot with 66.9 per cent

In Iraq Google Analytics is used by 3.4 per cent of websites, making it the lowest ranking

Macedonia is the Google Analytics top ranking country in the world with 83.3%

Asia is the only region of the world with a Google Analytics usage below 50 per cent with 43.5 per cent. CNZZ would have a much higher usage

under a third of all .mobi websites use Google Analytics as a web analytics tool – 29.4 per cent to be precise

just under two third of newly created .xxx TLD websites use Google Analytics with 62.2 per cent

84 per cent of .ie sites use a traffic analysis tool vs. 68 per cent worldwide

Google Analytics is installed on 78 per cent of .ie websites

Full Circle Studies ranks second on .ie websites

5 per cent of. ie sites use Adtech vs. 0.3 per cent worldwide

Adtech ranks third behind AdSense and DoubleClick

See TargetOnlineMarketing.com infographic ‘Who is using Google Analytics in 2012’

Google Analytics – and by extension its overwhelming worldwide usage – is using: first party cookies and JavaScript code.All websites have to comply with evolving data privacy guidelines, cookies technologies, country specific e-commerce laws, etc… As a website owner do make a point of having up to date legal information on your website. If you need guidelines, get in touch with the IIA.

In this article I give a basic overview of this new curated knowledge site that came out of private beta at the beginning of the year to much acclaim. I didn’t write too much about the business applications of Quora. However I have obviously been thinking about that since and briefly I think they are as follows:

Gain knowledge: Many complain about the mundanity of much of the content on Facebook and Twitter. “Oh there are two many updates like “I’m on the bus.” In contrast to this Quora is heavily curated and while you can follow those in your network (or not!) you can also choose to follow specific topics (e.g. I am following Social Media Marketing) In fact you can follow only topics and no people at all.

Build your network: However following topics and questions relating to your industry will allow you to develop your network, especially internationally. Quora’s system which allows users to “vote up” answers will also allow you to quickly recognise who is rated among their peers. This could potentially allow you to scout partners in different regions or, in our case, potential speakers.

Search: While Quora actively discourages mentioning brand names their site is completely open to the search engines so sharing your knowledge and expertise on a topic that your customers search for and using keywords cannily naturally in your responses will only lead those customers back to you. E.g. Check out this thread on “wine opener gadgets“.

It’s not email…apparently. It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Messages. Some call it the Gmail Killer, some doubt it’s viability at all and some are just confused by it. So, what is Facebook Messages?

Yesterday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced details of his one stop shop for all your messaging needs. It combines your email, text messages and chats with a strong focus on the social element of online communication. When you select a contact, you will instantly see your entire conversation history regardless if it was through IM, SMS or email. This adds context to conversations – we don’t just converse with people using one method and now all methods will be integrated. Facebook says, “it’s like having an ongoing record of your friendship”. Aww, how sweet.

So far so good! It sounds like the ideal solution for personal emails. However, Facebook are at pains to say this is not an emailing system. Despite the fact that you will now have access to a @facebook.com email address, the Messages service is designed to act more as a ‘switchboard’ for your communications needs. Zuckerberg stated that Facebook believes modern messaging should be “seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal”. “It’s not e-mail,” he said.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I happen to be quite fond of email. I like my Gmail account; I like having all of my different email addresses integrated into my Gmail account. I don’t think I’m quite ready to abandon emails just yet.

There is one area I can see Facebook outshining Gmail and that’s in the prioritising of messages. While Gmail has its Priority Inbox (something which is not as intuitive as they seem to believe), Facebook has its Social Inbox. FB knows who your friends are already. It knows who you converse with regularly. Your social inbox will likely only contain messages from people you deem important to you socially. Messages from everyone else will fall into your ‘Other’ folder. In fact, as with FB’s other functions and services, you can restrict who has the ability to message you – i.e. Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Groups, etc.

Why have Facebook launched this service? Well, with over 500 million current Facebook users, there’s definitely a market for the service. The pre-existing Facebook Mail is clunky and unintelligent, so a change was definitely needed. Furthermore, Zuckerberg explained recently that when he asked a group of high school students why they “don’t really use e-mail”, the reply was “it’s too slow”. Text messaging is near instant and Facebook wants its Messages system to reflect this.

Which brings us back again to the abandonment of email – “We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Zuckerberg said. For a system that claims not to be email, it looks a lot like email to me…

The Facebook Messages Inbox

…except, not as good. Facebook Messages cannot replace email. It’s advantages will be in the instantaneous nature of the service, the swift responses, the quick back-and-forth. However, if you use email for more than short bursts of information (I definitely do), Messages won’t be for you. Granted, Facebook have purposely geared their service this way.

Every email someone sends to darren_byrne21678@facebook.com will go into Facebook Messages as part of a single conversation. If you end up sending me several emails about a variety of topics, I’ll see all of those separate emails as one conversation. FB Messages doesn’t have Subject Lines. Again, I see this as a huge flaw, while Facebook call it a design feature.

I can see plenty of advantages to Messages, particularly for personal communications, and, as an upgrade of their current Facebook Mail service, it is a huge improvement. But will it change how I communicate online? I don’t see it. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

Frankly, with so much still wrong with Facebook – the privacy settings, the user interface for Facebook Groups, the lack of message archive accessibility and the fact that there are still no email alerts available to Page Admins, to name a few – I would rather Facebook get their core product right before throwing a new one at us.

For the moment, Facebook Messages is invite-only – and each person has a limited number of invitations to share. Are you using it yet? Let us know your thoughts on Messages. Will it work or will it go down in the annals of Internet lore, alongside Google Wave, Bebo and Boo.com?

In a few short days, many of Ireland’s best bloggers will descend upon Galway to celebrate all that is great about the Irish Blogosphere. Congratulations to all those who were shortlisted, including a number of IIA members. High fives all ’round and have a great weekend.

For a full list of nominees go here and if you want to attend the event in the Radisson in Galway this Saturday, you can pick up a ticket here for just €15.00. 🙂

Twestival 2010 is happening on Thursday 25th March from 6.30 pm – 12.30 at the ODEON on Harcourt Street. This year Concern is the benefactor of the WORLDWIDE event.

This Thursday, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness. Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

Hello to all the IIA members and those who follow the blog. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Darren Byrne and I am the newest member of the IIA team. I’ll be helping out for a few months, while Roseanne is on maternity leave. You’ll most likely see me blogging, tweeting, Facebookering (hmmm!!!) for the IIA when I’m not pushing papers.

You may know me from such interwebby places as Twitter, Culch.ie and my own humble blog at DarrenByrne.com. If you have any queries, thoughts or ideas regarding the IIA, please feel free to get in touch darren {at} iia {dot} ie